Sustainable Kitchens on the Back Burner

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Justin Johnson, owner of Sustainable Kitchens, a consulting firm, in his home kitchen. “The next challenge we have to conquer is making sustainability more affordable - in other words, making it more sustainable,” he said.CreditJustin Johnson

By Christopher F. Schuetze

May 1, 2015

When LG introduced the Smart Manager Refrigerator at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas three years ago, proponents predicted a short wait until refrigerators that could scan their own shelves and order directly from the supermarket were part of the standard consumer kitchen.

But, as often happens, technology was a few steps ahead of people’s preferences. While critics hailed the device’s touch-screen interface and ability to update lists on smartphones, a price tag that was up to three times higher than that of an ordinary “dumb” fridge kept the Smart Manager from being the next must-have. LG has since stopped selling the consumer version of the fridge in the United States, though it promises to reintroduce them soon.

While food sustainability is a war being fought on many fronts — including the home front — experts say that consumers are only slowly coming around to greening their kitchens. Unlike other food-based decisions, for which people are increasingly willing to read the fine print or go to the Internet to research, green kitchen utensils and appliances are still too often considered a luxury item.

“I think that the kitchen is quite a good scene for more sustainable behavior,” said Fleur Gadd, a researcher at The Big Picture, a British design research agency that has looked closely at food and cooking in an environmental context.

But in comparison to other consumer products — look at the deflating price tags on some electric or hybrid cars, for example, or the rapidly shrinking cost of roof-top solar panels — green kitchens are still expensive.

“The next challenge we have to conquer is making sustainability more affordable — in other words, making it more sustainable,” said Justin Johnson, who runs Sustainable Kitchen, an American consulting firm for the consumer market.

Because kitchens are the one place in the household where relatively extreme temperatures are produced, much greening has historically been achieved by making major appliances — fridges and freezers at the cold end, ovens and stoves at the hot — more energy-efficient. Certification systems and labeling, such as EnergyStar in the United States, have been instrumental in signaling potential savings to consumers.

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360 cookware, which is made in a factory in Wisconsin that is powered exclusively by wind-generated electricity.CreditJustin Johnson

But some green advancements are more expensive, and easier to achieve, than others. So-called smart fridges — which have the potential to virtually eliminate household food waste — must have the ability to communicate their contents to users or supermarkets and thus have to be equipped with specially adapted scanners, computers and screens. But even less conspicuous advancements cost money both because of research and development and because of the new materials and new processes they tend to require.

Manufacturers acknowledge the challenge and say they are taking steps to meet it. Ronald Voglewede, the global sustainability director at Whirlpool, which owns the brands KitchenAid, Maytag and Jenn-Air, said his company was looking to bring environmentally sound technology to the widest range of products, not just to a few, expensively priced show pieces.

Whirlpool recently introduced a new line of refrigerators in India with three doors, which let people open the fridge without letting all the cold escape — a simple solution that both saves the consumer money and the planet pollution from the coal power plants that produce much of India’s electricity.

“We see more questions and concern along with a higher preference for products around the globe that have better environmental performance,” he wrote in an email.

Ms. Gadd noted that much of the demand for energy efficient appliances is driven by the commercial sector, not consumers. Not only do industrial kitchens more quickly realize savings in energy costs because of more efficient appliances, they also tend to be more systematic when it comes to calculating costs and profits.

One sure way to bring consumers to greener kitchens, she said, is to highlight the link between certain practices, which happen to be environmentally friendly, and human health. For example, her research found that consumers are willing to exchange their frequently replaced plastic containers with more durable, but more expensive, stainless steel vessels because they fear that plastic might leach chemicals, not because they wish to reduce landfill.

In the same vein, Mr. Johnson advocates that green-minded cooks spend more to buy top-quality pots and pans so that they don’t have to throw them away as often. In his own kitchen he avoids pans with nonstick coatings because they do not last as long as uncoated pans. He has even toured the factory that makes his favorite brand, a premium-priced line called 360, to check its green bone fides; the factory, in Wisconsin, has been recognized by the United States Environmental Protection Agency for using only electricity generated by wind.

In the end, with the increasing awareness of how food and food preparation is linked to the health and well-being both of the individual and the planet, a follow-up question for the makers of a smart fridge might be whether the device would know to shop for food grown locally or produced organically.

“Primarily it is not so much the kitchen, in the long term, it is the foods that you are preparing in that kitchen,” said Dr. Paul Jonston, who runs the Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter. “Those are where the big environmental benefits come from.”